The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Katie Hansen

Kent Overbey had seen it before, part wanderlust, part desire to break free of a family pattern, to do what few had done before, to go against tradition or what was probably expected, to set off and take a new path, a journey that would include more risk but perhaps offer more reward.

With all roads pointing from the Overbey home outside Ann Arbor to the nearby campus of Michigan, Shane Overbey had his own ideas two decades ago, and they did not include anything maize and blue, the only two colors on the family crest. He wanted to go west. He wanted to go to school at Montana.

"He really wanted to get away from home. He was a big skier and loved everything about the outdoor culture in Missoula. He packed his stuff and just fell in love with Big Sky country," says his brother, now the soccer coach at Glenbard East High School in suburban Chicago.

So Kent Overbey had no trouble recognizing last fall the same signs in one of his players, his center back who was meeting with him to go over her college offers and options.

Katie Hansen's brother had decamped the family home years before to go to school at Wisconsin, just three hours away, and now was back in the Windy City, working in finance. Her sister was becoming an All-Horizon League runner at nearby Illinois-Chicago, where she is set to begin her senior year this fall.

She had all the interest she could want from coaches of programs from around the Midwest, but why weren't any of the schools standing out in her mind as the no-doubt-about-it option?

She could pick a school that was a short drive from home, but her siblings had already done that. Maybe this was her chance to become Katie Hansen instead of Michael and Allison's younger sister, the move toward independence that seems to be in the blood of most down-the-line offspring.

"With two older siblings, I was kind of used to doing the things they did," says Hansen, who also has 27 cousins, most of whom live within 10 minutes of the Hansen home in Lombard. "Montana was an opportunity to kind of branch out and do something nobody in my family had ever really done before."

Her coach, who has sent 39 players to college programs in his 11 years at the school, had seen it before, almost mirrored, when Shane Overbey had the same sentiments 20 years before. "I definitely saw the parallel between my brother and Katie in what they were looking for," he says.

But before there was Montana, there were questions, as recently as last fall, which is relatively late in the recruiting game, the clock entering the 90th minute. But she still hadn't found the right fit.

The future lawyer is logical to her core, much more so than emotional, his father's daughter down to the last strand of their shared DNA, so she and Overbey sat down and went over the list of coaches who would be at an ECNL showcase tournament in Phoenix last November.

When she came across the name Montana, the family vacation the family took to the state years and years before came to mind, but that was no reason to add to the list a school she'd never visited or really knew anything about. She was counting on a memory, sure, but she was also following a hunch.

"I do a lot of work in the recruiting process," says Overbey, "so I told her, 'Hey, I'll contact any school you want, but we can't waste these coaches' time. You need to sit down with your parents and ask yourself, Am I willing to go Missoula, Montana? Is that something I want?' "

She didn't know, but she couldn't get the idea out of her mind. She emailed then Griz coach Mark Plakorus to let him know she would be playing in Phoenix and that she hoped he could watch her club team play.

He did, and he was impressed with what he saw. And with the unexpected offseason losses of Raquel Watts and Claire Steffe, he knew his back line was going to be thin going forward.

"He emailed me back and said he really liked what he saw and that he wanted me to come out for a visit," Hansen says.

After a number of phone conversations between player and potential college coach, it was starting to feel right, but she was open to any other signs that might convince her it would be the right decision. Indeed: God works in the most mysterious of ways.

At some point last winter, between the tournament in November and her visit to campus in early February, there was a guest speaker at her church.

He described his own journey, how he couldn't figure out where he wanted to go to school, how he was concerned about finding the right fit. It could have been Hansen making the presentation.

"That kind of resonated with me," she says. "He ended his story by revealing how he chose a state he'd never been to. He ended up going to Montana. So there were random little things that stuck out to me, like they were pointing me in that direction."

Her trip to Missoula was supposed to be a formality, an in-person meeting that ensured both player and coach were making the right decision. Little did she know she would be making her visit during what would be one of the most tumultuous weeks in program history.

Plakorus sent Hansen a bare-bones itinerary of her visit on Sunday, Jan. 28. One day later he was informed his contract would not be renewed. One day later that news was made public.

"By Tuesday I hadn't heard from him. I was wondering why he hadn't told me more about my visit," she says. His email address wasn't coming up on her phone, so she typed in his name and did a Google search. "It came up with all these articles about how he'd resigned."

It would be a recruiting trip unlike any other, as the local media spent the rest of the week racing each other to see which outlet could produce the most sensational content.

"I stayed with Raye (Burton) and Alexa (Coyle), and it was a little overwhelming, especially being with the girls as they handled it, but at the same time, it showed me how close the team was," says Hansen.

"They all came together despite this thing happening to them. I felt it made them stronger and a tighter-knit group. It was something I really appreciated."

Even with all the unknowns, with a program without a head coach, she knew she had found her landing spot.

"What really struck me was the type of people who were here," she says. "Everyone was so warm and genuine. It felt like the kind of place I wanted to be a part of and play soccer for.

"It felt like the perfect fit for me, and I hadn't really gotten that at any other place I'd looked. I decided to go with it and follow my gut."

Her move from forward and midfielder to center back nearly a decade earlier was anything but a gut decision. In fact, it wasn't even hers. Her dad was her youth coach, and she was at an age when no one wants anything to do with a position that doesn't have scoring goals as the primary objective.

So Russell Hansen put his own kin there, "because I was his daughter and he could," she says. And that changed everything. "I really liked the position. I missed the scoring, but there are different glories that come with being on defense. I like it. It suits me."

That move back on the field as a sixth grader, from up front to the last line of defense, gave her a jump on learning the ins and outs of the position before her freshman year at Glenbard East.

In the spring of 2015, Overbey got his first look at the player who would become another entry on the list of those he'd send off to play collegiately. He knew that was Hansen's destiny just a few practices into her high school career.

"We knew from Day 1 that Katie was a special talent. Her technical ability was lacking a little bit as a freshman, but she worked so hard and her tenacity was there that we needed her on the field," he said.

"She stepped in and started half the season as a freshman and played in every single game. Her level of intensity and athleticism are second to none, so we needed her in there to win balls and make tackles."

Hansen's true arrival, in the sporting sense, when potential finally matches up with production, came when she was a sophomore. Not coincidentally, the Rams had their best season in program history in the spring of 2016.

And if there was a coming-out moment -- one that lasted, oh, maybe 90 minutes -- that highlighted her arrival, it took place on the artificial-turf field at Lewis University on a soggy day in late May, in a super-sectional matchup against Naperville North. Only eight teams were left in the bracket.

The winner would be off to the Class 3A state semifinals in the state's highest-enrollment classification, the big dogs, rarefied air for Glenbard East, which was making its way through uncharted waters.

Naperville North? The Huskies, ranked second in the nation at the time in one poll, were 21-1-1, hadn't lost since their season opener and had allowed only four goals all season while posting 19 shutouts. And they had won two of the previous four state titles. In other words, this was Hoosiers-level stuff.

"It was our first regional, our first sectional, our first super-sectional. We were beating teams we had no business beating," says Hansen. "We were playing teams that were ranked and had a history of winning.

"Our slogan that year was Why Not Us? That drove us. People saw us as an underdog, someone who maybe didn't deserve to be winning all these games, yet we were."

In the 23rd minute, Amanda Chlebek lofted a high ball toward goal from distance, a maybe-something-will-come-of this offering. It rarely did against Naperville North, but this time something special happened.

Dana Plotke rose up for the header and flicked it over the keeper's hands, just as her oversized gloves were about to grab hold of the ball. Both players turned and watched the ball go into the net. Neither looked like she could believe the result, a full second of stunned disbelief as time stood still.

The Rams, who would score again midway through the second half, defended 13 corner kicks that day but still held the Huskies without a goal and their leading scorer, Maddie Krejci, who would go on to play at Tennessee the following fall, without a shot. Final: 2-0.

"Katie was the best defender at the state tournament and the best player on the field in the games we were playing," Overbey says. "For a 15-year-old sophomore to say, I'm for real here, I can do whatever I put my mind to, was a great coming-of-age moment for her."

But that isn't his memory of Hansen that most immediately comes to mind when asked about his former player. That came the following year, after 10 seniors left the program, seven of whom would go on to play collegiately, after their improbable run the spring before.

"We were kind of on the ropes in terms of trying to fill all these holes," says Overbey. "So what does she do as center back? She steps up and was our second-leading scorer, with 11 goals and 10 assists. She was just deadly on set pieces and corner kicks.

"She took what we needed and made that what she was going to do for the team. It was just great leadership and taking that next step to be the player."

Glenbard East would lose to another nationally ranked team, Collinsville, 2-1 in double overtime in the state semifinals in that magical spring of 2016, but the Rams would take home the third-place trophy after topping Huntley in a shootout.

And if a girl could bank memories like that as a high-school player, how much better would it be if she could play the sport in college, when the investment is even greater, the stakes even higher? The Rams' run to state sealed it. Katie Hansen was going to do whatever she had to do to play college soccer.

"That was so much fun. All my best memories of high school are from soccer and that environment and the culture among the athletes," she says. "When you're around committed athletes, everyone has similar ideals, so you want to dedicate yourself to your sport even more. I like being part of that."

And she is at Montana, which survived the spring and has reestablished its bearings under first-year coach Chris Citowicki.

It's a team of extremes, with eight returning starters and championship dreams, but also one with 15 players, among the 27 on the roster, who have never played a match for the Grizzlies.

That disparity is on display every day at practice, where Taryn Miller, the Big Sky Conference Defensive MVP last season as a junior, is shadowed by Hansen, who is trying to learn everything she can from the veteran.

"I want to be Taryn. She's awesome. I look up to her," Hansen says. "She has such a powerful presence and knows exactly what she's doing. You can tell she's been through it.

"If I was a forward, I would have no interest in going up against her. Hopefully one day I can be just like her."

It was a slow start to her college career the first week of practices for Hansen, as the team focused more on offense than defense, the side of the game she hasn't played for years now.

And then there was a new coach to try to impress. And that applied to everyone. Until he finally got his point across: free yourself, just play.

"No one had played in front of him before, so everyone wanted to be on their A game, and sometimes when you try to be too perfect, it gets in your head and can bring you down," Hansen says.

"He has meetings before every practice, and at one of them he said soccer is a game of mistakes, that there are hundreds of turnovers in a typical college game. You made one of them? Who cares? Move past it. Hearing that really settled me down and made me realize that it's okay if I make a mistake.

"Now I feel like I'm starting to get into the swing of things. I haven't hit my full stride yet, but I'll get there, and I think it will be soon. I'm reaching more of a level of comfort."

She's eyeing law school, just like her dad, but doesn't know which major she'll chose as the route to get there. She's always loved reading and writing, and history and English have always been her favorite classes.

And that has moving toward law. "As I see it, each court case is like a new story," she says, just one week into writing her own, the next chapter of the rest of her life, being penned before our very eyes.

University of Montana Athletics

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Players Mentioned

Katie Hansen

Taryn Miller

Claire Steffe

Raquel Watts

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